The Dreadful Fluidity of Time

The first part of what I said was this:

No aspect of our lives is more frustrating and alarming than the fluidity of time. The past disintegrates and becomes distorted in our memories – it's forgotten; it disappears. The present passes faster than the blink of an eye. The future is only an illusion, the product of our imagination. It's impossible to know in advance what will happen or to count on what we expect.

That's why people have an obsessive need to set dates, to sink stakes into the continuum of time. We want to grasp time, control it. For that purpose we determine times and dates – but it's all artificial – it all flows from our need not to get lost in the maelstrom of time.

Judaism specializes particularly in the division of time, in setting times, in sanctifying time. Today is the thirtieth day after the burial of our precious son Asher. We must endow importance to the number of days that have passed, although we know that it's entirely arbitrary.

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Because I spoke only for a few minutes, I didn't expand much on that idea. I didn't say why I find the fluidity of time so frustrating and alarming, but what needs to be added?

As to why I said, “our lives,” and not “my life,” in part it was because of the communal nature of the event. Asher's tragic death was a blow to everyone who heard about it and knows us even slightly. The evening was so well attended because our friends wanted to express solidarity with us, but they also needed it for themselves, to find some consolation in the sharing of grief, concern, and fear of death.

But I also said “our lives” because my bereavement has opened my heart in a way that I am still baffled by. It has ripped away the defenses I had against compassion. I now know in a way that I never did and never could imagine what it is to lose someone one loves, not in the ordinary way of old age and gradual slipping into death, but in the shocking, unexpected way of losing someone who was “too young” to die.

I'm baffled because it means that I was emotionally stupid before, and I never thought of myself that way. Why did I need such painful and unnecessary shock and loss to learn something so self-evident?